On “Good Enough”

As part of Homecoming, Fluxers past and present contributed artifacts and essays to the Flux 20th Anniversary Book and Boxed Set. I offered a rumination on the internally controversial phrase “Good Enough”.

It was only when “Good Enough”, a rallying cry regularly exclaimed at the end of house meetings, was effectively banned from Flux a couple years ago that I started to seriously consider its significance, because that’s how I operate for some goddamn reason I guess.

A traditional reading finds Good Enough uttered at a moment of abandonment, with a shrugging, prideless disinterest. It denotes half-assery, shoddy workmanship, basically: giving up. Someone working from this definition likely assumes there is an ideal outcome, a perfect result that can be realized if enough time and effort are expended towards this end. However, according to a chart I drew a couple minute ago, this is based on a faulty premise:

The ideal is unachievable! The pursuit of perfection is asymptotic! Each unit of time and effort spent working towards a goal equals a smaller step closer to the goal. One could spend a million years pursuing perfection and still never reach it. Additionally, according to this other chart I just made, it turns out the moments leading up to “Good Enough” are the best parts of creativity. Look! Everything past Good Enough just plain sucks.

In a crazy house where a dozen amazing projects are in various stages of production, where residents are in various states of coming and going, in an enormous city bursting with possibility, “good enough” is the only sane choice someone with a healthy perspective on their place in the world can make.

Flux has never had access to the ideal building, the ideal materials, the ideal plumbing, the ideal funding, the ideal residents, the ideal staff, the ideal ideas. Everything about Flux is messy, tenuous, scrappy, barely held together. And that agility, that fluidity (literally: fluxiness) is what makes Flux Factory so ripe for exploration, for failure, for diving in, for moving on, for starting anew again and again. Perfection tries to tame the world’s chaos. Good Enough embraces it.

Flux Factory is good enough. That’s not a flaw, that’s a feature worth celebrating.